Certainty No More NEVILLE BARTLEY
| Youth Team Leader, SUNZ
C Job:2008782 SUNZ Adventure Magazine
ertainty is something that followers of Jesus are supposed to have. We are supposed to be certain in our forgiveness from God. We are to be certain of our place in eternity with God and certain in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ whom we follow and in whom we receive our forgiveness and our eternity with God. In a way, those things have been relatively easy for generations after the end of World War Two. However, for the first time since then our children and young people are facing a world that is unsure and a future that is uncertain. It may be easier for many of us who are older to say that the certainty of our faith hasn’t changed. However, we are not their age and looking ahead wondering what the future holds. Will they be able to freely travel again? Will they be able to own their own home? Will the planet keep warming and the sea levels rise and the physical world we know change? Will animals and plants continue
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to disappear from our world forever? Will another pandemic strike and could it be worse than this one? We already see high levels of anxiety and depression amongst our young people. When you add all the thoughts about their future on top of the anxiety many of them already feel, I think you can see why young people may struggle to be certain about anything in their lives. We have a generation under stress, a generation looking for answers, a generation looking for some sort of certainty. So where do they find that certainty? How do they find that certainty? What role does the church play in that and what does God really have to offer? These are big questions that the church was already having to face in some ways before COVID-19. Now they are questions the church needs to quickly address and begin to answer. I don’t want to sound too simple here, but I think we have been spending too much time
